Christian Platonists considered the Platonic theory the best instrument for understanding and teaching the church traditions. But their approach seemed to be rather unhistorical and their methods – rather unscholarly. They insisted on the transcendence of God and were ready to acknowledge his intimate presence in the world. Their views on body and soul were dualistic, but they accepted bodily resurrection.

In 384 Augustine encountered the books by Platonists in Milan and it could be called a kind of a turning point for his basic themes, hi himself makes it clear that these books: “made it possible for him to view both the Church and its scriptural tradition as having intellectually satisfying and, indeed, resourceful content.” (Macdonald, Scott and Norman Kretzmann (1998). Medieval philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, p.3) From the books of Platonists he managed to conceive the possibility of a non-physical substance. From the same books he took the dualistic division between physical and spiritual, and he focused a lot on it in his early works. But despite all this he never considered the sensible world to be an evil itself, he believed that it was a problem of perception and will. All the Christian Platonists had their one ways of understanding Platonism. It is even hard to call Augustine’s theory a part, one of subspecies of Christian Platonism, it is more of something absolutely unique and individual. In his ideas of anthropology Augustine was absolutely Platonist, as he was insisting on the souls’ superiority to the body and it being independent from the body. The soul for him was superior in the hierarchy of reality. But still his ideas differed from those of Platonism in the sense of his crucial doctrine of man’s destiny, it was not a straight contradiction to Platonism, but a kind of very original theology of history and view upon human society. In the epistemology Augustine was Neoplatonic, especially with his doctrine of illumination, meaning that: “in spite of the fact that God is exterior to man, men’s minds are aware of him because if his direct action on them (expressed in terms of the shining of his light on the mind, or sometimes of teaching) and not as the result of reasoning from sense experience.” Platonists believed that body can not act on the soul. In his theology Augustine was very close to the general pattern of Christian Platonism – the God could not be the only One beyond Intellect and Being. His Trinitarian theory was very close to Neoplatonism. He stated the unity of God as Greek Christian thinkers did, but he tried to make some philosophical sense of this doctrine.